Designing educational escape rooms: validating the Star Model

Abstract

Escape games have become popular nowadays. Groups of people are locked inside riddles-filled rooms and have to work their way out finding clues and solving puzzles. While being fun for groups or team building, escape games have a great educational potential, which can be capitalized if teachers integrate them in their professional activities. In this paper we introduce the Star Model, a tool for teachers to design and play their own educational escape rooms, which was built on top of previous literature and experiences. We present and discuss its validation through a pre/post survey involving 50 primary secondary school teachers who participated in a course about educational escape rooms. The model validation suggests that the Star Model can be proposed as a valid tool for educational escape rooms design.